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Tech Leaders Push Back Against Obama's Efforts To Divert Discussion From NSA
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The Guardian reports that while President Obama tried to portray a meeting with tech leaders as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities including ways of improving the functionality of the troubled health insurance website Healthcare.gov, senior executives from Apple, Yahoo, Google, Comcast, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Netflix said they were determined to keep the discussion focused on the NSA. 'We are there to talk about the NSA,' said one executive who was briefed on the company's agenda before the event. After meeting Obama and vice president Joe Biden for two-and-a-half hours, the companies issued a one-line statement. 'We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the president our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urge him to move aggressively on reform.' Many of the senior tech leaders had already made public their demand for sweeping surveillance reforms in an open letter that specifically called for a ban on the kind of bulk data collection that a federal judge ruled on Monday was probably unlawful. Obama seemed sympathetic to the idea of allowing more disclosure of government surveillance requests by technology companies, according to a tech industry official who was briefed on the meeting. Marissa Mayer brought up concerns about the potentially negative impact that could be caused if countries, such as Brazil, move forward with legislation that would require service providers to ensure that data belonging to a citizen of a certain country remain in the country it originates, the official said. That would require technology companies to build data centers in each country — a costly problem for American Internet companies. The decision by the tech giants to press their case in such a public and unified way poses a problem for the White House. The industry is an increasingly influential voice in Washington, a vital part of the US economy and many of its most successful leaders are prominent Democratic political donors."
He did not hijack your meeting. It was always his. Get over yourself.
Obama forgot who his bosses are.
Obama thought he has become the KING of the Americans.
Obama is but one of the civil servants whose salaries are being paid by the American taxpayers.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
He should do what a Republican would do: lower their taxes in exchange for silence.
Table-ized A.I.
Obama may be the POTUS, but he is a VERY LOUSY potus.
VERY VERY LOUSY !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
countries, such as Brazil, move forward with legislation that would require service providers to ensure that data belonging to a citizen of a certain country remain in the country it originates
In other words, a cash grab. Brazil isn't the most enlightened country when it comes to spying, so this is a little "pot kettle black" situation, but really its just an excuse to try to force more companies to spend more money in Brazil. It has absolutely nothing to do with the feigned "outrage" the politicians are espousing.
Monstar L
Say what you will about America, but there's hope here yet. If Snowden is stock, most investors have not only stopped selling, he's fast becoming a savvy "Buy".
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Obama: "We are already aware of your concerns regarding surveillance. You don't think we didn't hear you muttering amongst yourselves beforehand, do you?"
Have gnu, will travel.
They're all playing for the same team...
America'd never b destroyed frm d outside. If v falter & lose r freedoms it'll b becoz v destroyed rselves
Surely you don't expect anyone to take you seriously with this, do you?
Internet privacy is under massive attack equally from government and big business, in particular from the firms whose CEOs just whined at^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H met with the President.
Why isn't that on the agenda? Don't tell me opt in. If you make a phone call or buy stuff with a credit card then you're being tracked by businesses that sell and swap your transaction histories with other businesses.
Thank you Apple, Yahoo, Google, Comcast, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Netflix. You are our greatest ally!
The companies are concerned about US government surveillance ONLY because
they know it will cost them money.
Otherwise the companies don't care, because if they DID care they would have
raised hell long before now. But the companies did not do that, did they ? No,
in fact they were willing servants for the swine in the government until the revelations
Snowden caused caused their positions to become unpopular. SO now these
companies are setting new records for backpedaling performance. There is not
much if any moral difference between these companies and the Nazis who tried to
claim they were "just following orders" when they were on trial at Nuremberg.
As Vonnegut would have said if he were still around :
"So it goes".
.
Period.
Look, it's getting out of control.
Tech CEOs know that.
Only idiots in DC don't know that.
RESPECT THE CONSTITUTION!
P.S.: either that or let's hope an asteroid wipes out SCOTUS and Capitol Hill at the same time.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's a clear and unanimous sentiment. They now understand what they have to do very clearly to serve the needs of their people, their business, and their pals in the rest of the world. There are no mixed messages here. So where is the problem?
Twinstiq, game news
When I first read the story, my instinct first instinct was to get up and say:"Mr. President I was came hear today to discuss NSA surveillance. Since that does not seem to be what will happen, I have other more important things I must do. So I will be going now. "
If allowed to leave I wonder who else would follow me. If not allowed to leave, what would the Secret Service do? Arrest me? There would be no reason to. Detain me as a danger to the president? I'm leaving not much reason their. In fact refusing to let me leave would be criminal kidnapping.
So what would happen?
That they would speak to him like indicates they neither need to respect him nor do they.
I'm fine with that, he should be impeached.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Obama forgot who his bosses are.
Yes, he did. They tried having a meeting with him to set him straight and he was recalcitrant.
Then again, he is POTUS so I think the banks are his REAL bosses!
Suck it Silicone Valley! You will NEVER - EVER - be more important than the banks!
It's disheartening that the ( insert epithet ) that are busy commoditizing our lives are perturbed by the ( other epithet ) that are spying on us. A pox on all their houses.
It is true and has always been that the best way to get the attention of large megacorporations, technological or otherwise, is to hit them in the pocketbook. Until Mr. Snowden came along, most of these tech companies willingly, some of them enthusiastically, cooperated with the government spies who were going to pay them considerable amounts of money. Phone companies even set aside special rooms and equipment to facilitate the spy agencies desires to scarf up terabytes of data. Now that all this has come to light, these tech giants stand to lose a fortune as others who do not wish to be spied on take their business elsewhere. How will common ordinary people ever know whether big government and big business are NOT under the same blanket, telling monstrous lies whenever it suits their agendas? Thank you Mr. Snowden!
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Sometimes it seems rare that personal rights and business interests intersect- but that is happening here.
The NSA activities are really harming the credibility of the federal government and that will hurt everybody where it matters- the pocketbook.
Imagine if you were able to post a link to this discussion here on slashdot from that dim and distant time of 2008 during the election with unforgeable timestamps showing that it indeed was a slashdot discussion from late 2013..
What a shift in a lot of people's viewpoint has happened.
Just after the election in 2008, I said that the level of expectation surrounding Obama was so great Superman couldn't have lived up to it. I'll revise that now, and say God couldn't have lived up to it.
I wasn't a supporter of Obama, but it probably would have mattered less than most think who won that election. My guess is that the world situation wouldn't be radically different (might be a little better, might be a little worse), and definitely the case of NSA surveillance wouldn't be all that different. It's the result of policy decisions over the last, at least, 50 years.
We've been shown once again a truth that we seem to forget every 4-8 years in the "irrational exuberance" of campaigns.
National political leaders (presidents, prime ministers, whatever) are amazingly limited in what they really can do. The existing policies, public perceptions, politics and geopolitical realities massively constrain their options for what decisions to make.
Those offices are bully pulpits, as Teddy Roosevelt said, and sometimes can move nations with the preaching.
But, in the end, it's still limited. (And you don't want to live in places where they do have largely unlimited power.)
And, when those leaders fail to live up to what is expected (often unreasonably) by those who elected them, the backlash can be ferocious.
Witness this discussion (or some of the ones while W. was in office here on slashdot).
Nobody thought Nixon was in any danger of being removed until the house passed articles and the rubber met the road. How do you know what the Senate will do? If the Republican controlled house feels that this is a high crime, they should do their constitutional duty and impeach him. If the senate doesn't go for it then they can answer to the voters.
The real truth is that Republicans in the house are just fine with this, they just want it to be a Republican president who holds the keys to the turn key totalitarian state. All this about the senate is just misdirection so that you will vote for a Republican senator. The truth is that, when faced with a clear impeachable offense, it is the Republican Party that is refusing to act. Stop going on about the Senate and start insisting that the house vote to impeach.
The bottom line is "the tech industry" mines and sells your data (i.e., "every little thing you do"), so in order to keep their bottom line growing "the tech industry" must get the NSA's ability to mine for terrorist activity stopped before the American people force their (not "their" as in "the American people's", but "their" as in "the tech industry's") Representatives and Senators to again prioritize their Constitutional responsibilities above their bought-and-paid-for promises and outlaw all data mining as the invasion of privacy that it is.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
What I find fascinating is how the media had us believe that the man was elected because his campaign was the "modern" one, the one that had whole of the Internet dialed in, total control over and support of social media, and everything tech and hip on its side. And yet that same organization can't get a website running properly, particularly one that people don't get to use but have to use. And that same organization wants to deflect criticism and blame for the NSA's current methods.
You normally put just factories in countries other than your own. Cisco's proposing to put development in Canada, which is unheard of. Sun and IBM used to have some limited development here when developers in California couldn't be had for love or money, but that's mostly gone by now.
davecb@spamcop.net
He did not hijack your meeting. It was always his. Get over yourself.
"If I'm here and you're here, doesn't that make it our time?" -- Jeff Spicoli
If anyone needs to get over himself it is the President. He is not a dictator. If he wants the support of the people he needs to listen to the people. If he wants the support of industry he needs to listen to industry. The people and industry are not here to do his bidding. He works for us.
As President he deserves respect, nothing more. Everything else he has to earn. We should politely disagree and politely avoid our agenda being blown off in a meeting, but we do not have to move off of our agenda at a meeting because he wishes it so.
If the tech industry's #1 concern is NSA overreach then they are correct to stay on that topic until satisfied with the President's response. The tech industry is not obligated to fix his healthcare IT and personal PR problems.
It comes by foot, and leaves by horse.
He allowed his "signature legislation" to be gutted ...
How did he allow **his** signature legislation to be gutted? **He** never offered any legislation. He mentioned some broad guidelines during the campaign and immediately upon election turned it over to the Democratic Party leadership who immediately grabbed Democratic party supporters and lobbyists and went into the back rooms to draft the legislation in private. He immediately abandoned his leadership on the issue.
This comment is complete and utter bullshit, which harms people suffering from real racist issues. I do understand that you learned this from people paid to distribute propaganda, and perhaps you are just "one of those people".
Obama is no different than Bush, who was no different than Clinton, who was no different from Bush, etc... Each of these people had no care for US Citizens in general, just their buddies followed by themselves. Those are verifiable facts based on actions these people took, not because of what they said. Nothing is racist by pointing out that they are failing in their duties as representatives of "The People".
Thanks for playing "I'm an idiot!", you win the game!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
A half-breed dope shit head from Hawaii (by way of Indonesia and Kenya) who became the biggest ass hole on the planet lectures the ass hole wantabees who are all "pure breed." Now that is Irony.
A continue to be amazed at the amount of Leftard crap on /. in these issues, NSA's blanket trawls is clearly in contravention of the Fourth Amendment! A Federal Appeal Judge has decided so.
Not only is it a HUGE waste of TAX-PAYER money, it dosn't work, is a huge distraction from things that do work and it engenders a completely un-American attitude in your entire security apparatus, which is HUGE, COSTLY, IN-EFFICIENT and ILLEGAL.. Snowden deserves the peace prize not being criminalized, and all those complicit need to be removed from office, starting with Obama.
The bottom line is that the State of Israel does 100 times more with 1% of the resources, because it is highly selective, you run a goat fuck!
I am Swiss, but have spent lots of time in the US, mostly on the Left Coast, you have lots of drive-by and school shootings and your stupid pols go on about gun lay, at the same time you are force feeding kids with psychotropic drugs that would be child-abuse in any sane country, well some kid forgets to take his pill, or rebels and you have Sandy Hook, in a "Gun Free Zone" 20 dead.
In my land 10%+ of the males will carry their sevice SIG 226, and the shooter will be shot by a tested marksman ... and usually not killed, since we test 4 X / year
we can usually hit a hand, or certainly the shoulder without the macho, two to the center of mass and one to the head to make sure.
You have become a pathetic people, frightened of dru-dubs, and you deserve everything that you will get as a reward for 40 years of sloth.
Heard a quote from the meeting or a comment on it in the radio (sadly, they did not specify the source): "It is not just the constitution that is at stake here, but a whole lot of money."
Nice priorities, guys. You certainly know how to make the president listen.
Obama spent all his time negotiating with right-wing Democrats like Nelson and Lincoln, and Republicans like Grassley and Snowe. Not with Harkin or Kennedy, a long-time supporter of Single Payer. Obama also killed the public option in a deal with the for-profit hospital lobby, kept single payer off the table even as a point of negotiation, and made the same backroom deal with the same lobbyist that he attacked in the 2008 campaign. And every public statement in support of a public option was accompanied by a statement praising amendments that would gut it (like Snowe's trigger). His OFA did jack and squat to demand a PO, and finally Obama press-ganged liberals like Kucinich into passing Romneycare via reconciliation, after spending a year insisting that 60 votes were needed to pass a PO.
Obama showed all kinds of leadership on betraying his own campaign promises. You could describe pretty much his entire presidency that way.
The NSA surveillance is the serious damaging problem for business. And not only for the US companies. The usage of the cloud SaS, say, the Google Apps for Business could be very profitable for a company, but the internal opposition is bringing in the data security issue. The say, - first the company data gets into hands of a rogue government official, then later it could be sold to a competitor.
However, moving data centers to patriarchal countries could be even worse. The data centers would be periodically stopped by government officials to check sanitary conditions (as a pretext).
All the servers could be taken out by trucks to check for an illegal content. The employees of the data centers would be hired via nepotism system, so up-time would be not great.
The US officials are not perfect, but at least they could be called reasonable. In patriarchal societies the cloud computing model, the data centers, would not work at all. We would be obliged to switch to the silos model of desktop documents once again.
Never harm US corporate interests (at least not unless you're helping a separate group of US corporate interests). Business interests are the most important piece in US politics. They decide who gets to even run for congress or President and who goes largely unnoticed by the public by influencing who is talked about and known and who isn't leading into primary elections, as well as influencing things to a lesser extent later in the election process. Hurt US business interests and you'll quickly have upwards of a dozen congresscritters bitching about it. In a case like this, where no other US business interest is helped, there's no pushback from anyone except the NSA, and because of that, congresscritters with no stake in the battle will join with those who do to get brownie points. So it ends up being the NSA versus most of congress. In the end, reform (or cover-up) will happen, at least to the extent where Google et al are no longer losing money because of the NSA.
To be fair they also care because the public's trust is vital to their products. They can't have product to sell (aggregate user data) if people don't trust them enough to hand it over.
The problem is not that the government isn't telling us that they were fucking us in the ass, at least not after Snowden anyway. The problem is that we don't want to be fucked in the ass at all. We wrote you a note letting you know that over 230 years ago and for the first ~200 years you were somewhat good about honoring those wishes, but lately you've been coming home drunk on power and having your way with us without our consent. Letting us know how you're going to violate us isn't enough - it's time for you to stop violating us altogether.
So basically what we're saying is that Obama portrayed this as an "open discussion" and in fact doesn't give a flying fuck what anyone else thinks (tech leadership or otherwise) and intends to push forward with this Nazi shit regardless. Anyone surprised?
Has that agency you work for quit pulling this kind of shit?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The politicians never stopped themselves from passing unconstitutional laws seeking to weaken or outright exempt the Constitution. Every attempt has to be met with strong public pressure and in recent generations that pressure has weakened either by ineptitude or the indirect assault on democracy by wealthy institutions.
Free assembly is just as strongly protected as free speech but the public does not defend it so local city councils routinely trounce that right and the "security state" along with that unconstitutional century-old espionage act has done quite a bit against free speech and free press.
The 4th is obvious to anybody but a lawyer that it does not allow copying of your personal papers, then allowing them to later be easily accessed and if something bad is found a retroactive warrant can be issued... The reason juries are made up of peers is because of the belief in common sense over "lawyer-think" which has nothing to do with truth, honest logic, or science.
Any government would run longer, better, if lawyers were barred from serving in office. Their profession is to justify the means for their client's ends. Engineers, scientists, professors - they are the problem solvers.
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